Washington, D.C. · September 11, 1941 Starting on September 1, 1941, two years into the Battle of the Atlantic, U.S. warships began escorting convoys of British-bound merchantmen from the North American coast. Convoys departed from Newfoundland, Canada, and ended in the mid-Atlantic at Iceland. Four days after initiating the escort service, the U.S. destroyer Greer…
London, England · July 22, 1940 On this date in 1940 the British government created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization. For security purposes the SOE was concealed behind the name “Inter-Service Research Bureau.” (At the time the SOE was variously referred to as “the Baker Street Irregulars,” “Churchill’s Secret Army,” or the “Ministry of…
Washington, D.C. · July 7, 1941 Long before the U.S. entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began unraveling Congressional legislation that had hindered his aiding Great Britain and other Western democracies in their armed conflict with Nazi tyranny. Four successive Neutrality Acts from the 1930s were undone with “help” from two German U‑boat attacks…
Berlin, Germany · May 24, 1943 In June 1942 German submarines sank 637,000 tons of British shipping—a greater total than in any previous or subsequent month. So many prowling U‑boats made it hard for merchant convoys sailing in the major trans-Atlantic traffic lanes to evade detection. The next year, in March, Atlantic U‑boats sank 82 ships…
London, England · May 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the battleship Bismarck set out from occupied Norway into the main Atlantic shipping lanes, there to act as long-distance commerce raiders. It was the maiden voyage of Germany’s monstrous battleship, the most lethal weapon in any navy’s…
Reykjavik, Iceland · May 17, 1941 On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, ostensibly to protect the neutrality of the two Scandinavian countries against Franco-British aggression. Adolf Hitler had become convinced in mid-December 1939 that the two West European Allies, at war with Germany for three and a half months now, were…
London, England · May 9, 1941 As war loomed in Europe, British codebreakers based at Bletchley Park outside London worked feverishly to unravel the Enigma cipher machine, which the Germans used to encrypt their most secret communications. The Enigma had a number of differently wired scrambler rotors that operators changed and shuffled through billions of…
Washington, D.C. · April 10, 1941 On April 9, 1941, a full year after Operation Weseruebung had brought Denmark and Norway into Nazi Germany’s orbit, the Danish minister in Washington, D.C., Henrik Kauffmann, signed a treaty with the United States, authorizing the U.S. to protect the remote Danish colony of Greenland “against attack by a…
Brenner Pass, Austria · March 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 on the Austro-Italian border, German leader Adolf Hitler and Italian strongman Benito Mussolini met for their fifth face-to-face meeting. Hitler had requested the summit in order to force Il Duce (Italian, “the leader”) to take sides within the framework of the so-called Pact…
Aboard the HMS Walker in the North Atlantic · March 17, 1941 On this date in 1941 U-99, skippered by Otto Kretschmer, one of Germany’s most famous U‑boat commanders, had just fired the last of her torpedoes when she was spotted by a British destroyer southeast of Iceland. By this time Kretschmer, on his eighth patrol,…
